Working with byte arrays

Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and
later

The ByteArray class allows
you to read from and write to a binary stream of data, which is
essentially an array of bytes. This class provides a way to access
data at the most elemental level. Because computer data consists
of bytes, or groups of 8 bits, the ability to read data in bytes
means that you can access data for which classes and access methods
do not exist. The ByteArray class allows you to parse any stream
of data, from a bitmap to a stream of data traveling over the network, at
the byte level.

The
writeObject()
method allows you to write
an object in serialized Action Message Format (AMF) to a ByteArray,
while the
readObject()
method allows you to read
a serialized object from a ByteArray to a variable of the original
data type. You can serialize any object except for display objects,
which are those objects that can be placed on the display list.
You can also assign serialized objects back to custom class instances
if the custom class is available to the runtime. After converting
an object to AMF, you can efficiently transfer it over a network
connection or save it to a file.

The sample Adobe® AIR® application described here reads a .zip
file as an example of processing a byte stream, extracting a list
of the files that the .zip file contains and writing them to the
desktop.